Hena Thrones, Fancy Toilets, and Other Kitsch: Research on the Sign-Objects of Kezban Taste

Abstract

Since the 1940s, in the context of accelerated immigration flowing from rural villages to Istanbul, settled city dwellers have perceived the immigrants as a threat to their urban values and have developed several distinctive discriminatory attitudes and practices. In the urban cultural sphere, where modern Western values are embraced, Eastern and rural practices and the relevant consumer culture have been assessed and judged as inferior. The social groups who abandoned their home villages but still lacked the symbolic capital that would enable them to live out an urban lifestyle considered mass consumption to be a shortcut for adapting to city life. Thus, they developed an inappropriate aesthetic style, also referred to as the field of kitsch. The rosary, the typical sign-object of the Haciaga stereotype suggesting nouveau riche men, or the thick golden necklace that is emblematic of the Maganda stereotype with its vulgar masculinity or inappropriate combinations of whiskey and lahmacun, exemplify disseminated judgements embodied through objects. The Kezban profile was initially that of a naive country girl in popular movies of the 1970s; however, in the following decades, she was portrayed as a vulgar woman in various media productions. Kezban, with her consumption patterns, taste, and worldview, represents distaste for the modern urban woman. Through the sample, composed of 18 urban middle-class participants, possible sign-objects of the Kezban profile were investigated. Qualitative analysis informed the use of emerging repetitive thematic patterns such as 'decorations disjointed from the function' and 'the ostentatious appropriations of local agents'. The objects under these themes are discussed in the category of kitsch and show similarities with the aesthetics of 'arabesque'.